Letter: EPA shutdown would imperil safety

Saturday

Dec 16, 2017 at 5:00 AM

I’ll never forget the girl who had socks taped over her hands. She looked about 2. Usually someone with socks on her hands is playing puppets, or playing with mom’s laundry. But as I learned in Flint, Michigan, it’s not about playing at all. Socks were the simplest way to keep a toddler whose tainted bathwater gave her a chemical rash from scratching off her skin.

Her mother looked scared. Who wouldn’t be? She could not trust that the water she gave her 2-year-old was safe to drink or to wash in. As the mother of a 14-year-old, I could imagine how she felt: powerless and afraid.

She welcomed me, an EPA scientist, into her home to fix the problem, to figure out what she needed so that she could trust her drinking water and provide her daughter with a safe home where bath time was a joy, not a terror. As many of my colleagues in the Chicago regional office of U.S. EPA did last year, I drove to Flint and worked long hours for weeks at a stretch to restore the safety of the drinking water and do our best to address the horror of lead poisoning that affected tens of thousands of residents there.

It was hard, but we succeeded in protecting the people and reducing the lead levels in the water, though it’s still a work in progress. For over a year, EPA tackled the problem from every side: We handed out bottled water. We told people how to protect themselves. We provided water filters and educated residents on how to use them. And we got Flint on track to have a new, safe water supply. Residents saw, and I saw, what EPA can do when called upon to protect the health and safety of the American people.

But now, Congress and the Trump Administration are on the verge of shutting down the government, halting programs from drinking water to toxic cleanups and sidelining employees essential to carrying them out.

Water is life. We know that especially well in the area of the Great Lakes, the lifeline of the Midwest and a national treasure. We can protect them only with a strong and effective EPA. Yet Congress would put our engineers and scientists, the “first responders” for public health and environmental protection, out of work until they resolve the impasse. They’d be playing politics with drinking-water protection, cleaning up toxic sites and curbing harmful air pollution.

A federal-government shutdown would be neither wise nor safe. EPA responded to the Flint crisis and put fixes in place, but not before thousands were poisoned with lead in their drinking water. We need EPA to be ready to respond again, if necessary, to prevent future Flints from happening. We cannot do that if our engineers and scientists are at home.

Ohio Sens. Rob Portman and Sherrod Brown must support the immediate passage of a budget with full funding for EPA so that other parents across the country will not ever have to worry about their water. Congress should not shut us down.

Felicia Chase

Member

American Federation of

Government Employees

Local 704

Chicago

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